"Jeff Hecht - The Greenhouse Papers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hecht Jeff)

тАЬOh, Petra!тАЭ she sighed, тАЬdon't be ridiculous. Why don't you settle down and think up a proposal to get
some money for computer time? Do you want to be a postdoc forever?тАЭ

I trudged dejectedly back to my cubicle, in no mood to accomplish anything. Andrew Harrison Harding's
request for proposals still sat on the desk. I picked it up, wondering how much paper had been wasted
on it. Could accumulating paper really slow the greenhouse effect? With nothing better to do, I decided
to quantify the matter.

The first task was to estimate the carbon content of a typical 8.5 by 11 inch page. Precision demanded
careful carbonization of several hundred representative sheets, weighing the ashes on analytical balances,
averaging the results, and taking means and standard deviations. I took a ream of paper from the
storeroom, weighed it on the department mail scale, divided, guessed at the carbon content, and got a
rough estimate; one gram of carbon per sheet.

The next step was converting five billion tons of carbon into paper units. The result was on the back of an
envelope in a second: 5 x 10 15 sheets in proper scientific notation. or five quadrillion if I really wanted to
impress someone. Divided by world population, it was a million sheets per person. That-I found by
measuring a box of computer paper in the storeroom-is a pile about 100 meters high, or a volume of 6
cubic meters. Three solid closets a year! Even Alice did not collect that much.

What about junk mail and other solid waste? Trash in landfills doesn't decay very fast, so I could assume
it stays there almost forever. One reference said each American generates about 750 kilograms of solid
waste a year. If 100 kilograms was carbon sequestered in landfills, and if everyone in the world
generated that much solid waste, that would only account for half a billion tons of carbon. However, most
people live in developing countries where they don't generate as much trash.

I should have stopped there. I would have stopped, if I had had anything else to do. But I didn't, so I
browsed through the library, getting more and more frustrated with the carbon-dioxide problem.

The literature contained perfectly serious proposals to plant an area the size of Australia in fast-growing
trees, cut them down every few years, and bury the wood so it would not decay. Nobody was doing
anything about the greenhouse effect but generating hot air and paper.

The least I could do, I decided on the way back to my basement office, was to show how ludicrous the
whole thing was. Sitting at my desk, I devised a purely paper solution. To generate the needed paper, I
would put scientists to work generating reports. The greenhouse is an important global problem, so
everyone in the world should get the reports, and preserve them indefinitely. It would take 10,000
scientists, each writing a 100-page report each year, to generate the required million sheets of paper per
person.

I would be lucky to wind up as one of them, I thought sourly, then saw Andrew Harrison Harding's
request for proposals sitting in my basket. тАЬWhy not?тАЭ I asked myself, and switched on my word
processor, convinced I could do better than any economist.

The words flowed freely all afternoon. At least, I told myself, I was practicing the proposal-writing skills
that Alice thought were important. Gloss over difficulties, she had advised in a cynical mood. Waving my
hands, I dismissed the energy costs of producing paper as тАЬan issue to be studied in more detail in a
separate study, but obviously of an order of magnitude no more than comparable to the energy costs of
burying biomass to sequester carbon.тАЭ I passed off the request for a preliminary environmental impact